Sunday, April 15, 2012

Sheriff Doug Gillespie rode with Cliven Bundy in his weathered, white
pickup down a bumpy trail on the outskirts of Bunkerville. They chatted
about the Bureau of Land Management's plans to round up the rancher's
cattle.
The sheriff agreed to disagree with the 65-year-old rancher's
suggestion of what he should do as Clark County's elected law enforcer
to keep federal land managers from "stealing" his cattle.
"These are federal lands. They can do what they want to do,"
Gillespie recalled telling Bundy during the April 6 tour of the Gold
Butte range, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. "I use my influence to
make sure whatever is done is done by the law and, No. 2, it is done
peacefully."
Then and now, Bundy remains steadfast in his intention to resist
government efforts to round up his cattle from rangeland where his
family has lived since 1877.
The BLM had canceled Bundy's permit for the Bunker­ville allotment in
1994. But he continued to let his cattle graze on the vast, sage-dotted
landscape -- without paying the $2-per-head-per-month fee and in
violation of a federal court order that he remove his herd to preserve
the habitat for the federally protected desert tortoise.
So, the BLM finally hired cowboys and planned a helicopter-assisted
roundup last week to remove his herd -- anywhere from 500 to 900 head of
cattle depending on who's counting.
The BLM's last-minute decision to divert its roundup plans, at least
for now, to pursue another legal avenue raises questions about how one
man's resistance to the bureau's rules will affect other ranchers in the
West.
This could signal the resurgence of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a
homegrown state's rights movement against federal land ownership that
swept across rural Nevada and surrounding states in the 1980s.
LONG-SIMMERING FEUD
Bundy didn't mince words when he put the BLM contractor on notice about the cattle gather that was supposed to begin Wednesday.
"There is a volatile situation currently taking place," Bundy wrote
to Cattoor Livestock Roundup Inc. "Cliven Bundy will do whatever it
takes to protect his property and rights and liberty and freedoms of
those of, We the People, of Clark County Nevada."
His threat seemed to have worked, at least for the time being. The
BLM blinked when officials in Washington, D.C., decided late Tuesday to
suspend the roundup indefinitely because of safety concerns for people
involved.
That disappointed BLM Southern Nevada District Manager Mary Jo
Rugwell. She and her staff had spent months plotting the roundup and
coordinating with BLM rangers, a special bureau agent for the Southwest
region and the sheriff's staff and officers who work out of the area's
rural substation.
The FBI even sent a representative to listen in, Gillespie said.
After all, they didn't want the long-simmering feud over grazing
rights to boil over into a deadly confrontation like what occurred at
the Weaver Ranch in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, that left two family members and
one federal marshal dead in 1992. Or, like the standoff in Waco, Texas,
that ended on April 19, 1993, when federal agents besieged cult leader
David Koresh's Branch Davidian ranch, ending in a fiery assault that
killed 76 people.
"Nobody wants this to turn into a confrontation where violence would
occur," Gillespie said. "Mr. Bundy doesn't want that and neither does
the BLM."
While he's not concerned that Bundy or his family would resort to
violence, the sheriff said, the situation is complicated and emotions
run high.
"I always get nervous when people come to support a cause on one side
or the other. Whether on the environmental side or the cattle rancher
side, we have to do our best to mitigate those situations from
occurring," the sheriff said.
Gillespie's advice to the BLM was to revisit legal avenues for
dealing with the disgruntled rancher. He said he felt uncomfortable
trying to be the peacemaker after the 1998 court order that federal land
managers were trying to enforce had withered with time.
"Those court documents are old," Gillespie said. "I ask them to take
that back to court and address the issue. Then, OK, if he continues to
trespass, then you seize the cattle.
"In my conversations with the BLM from their legal standpoint, I see
it as a case of 'could you, should you.' Could you? Yes. Should you? No.
Cattle does not trump human life."
CATTLE'S IMPACT
Rugwell made removing Bundy's cattle one of her priorities when she
took the reins of the local BLM office in 2008. In the early 1990s when
he was still paying grazing fees, the herd on his 158,666-acre
Bunkerville allotment was capped at 150 head. About 10,486 acres of the
allotment was on National Park Service lands along the tip of Lake
Mead's Overton arm.
After his grazing permit was canceled in 1994, the herd grew and some cattle migrated to far reaches of the Gold Butte area.
Last week, Bundy estimated his adult cattle numbered about 500 in what the BLM describes as the 500,000-acre Gold Butte area.
Rugwell said her staff in December began planning for the roundup but
the cattle's impact on the landscape was getting out of hand, causing
considerable damage to natural resources even though Bundy had been
diligent in maintaining some 30 spring-fed water systems in the area.
"We really didn't know how big the problem was until we started doing
counts last year. There were as high as 900 (cattle) out there,"
Rugwell said Thursday.
Subsequent counts in August tallied 730 cattle, and the latest one
this month turned up 750. That doesn't include strays that had wandered
over the state line to Pakoon Springs, Ariz.
Rugwell had set a target of early to mid-April for the roundup because conditions would be right for it.
"We were making sure that it's not too hot, because there would be
less stress on cattle and people. That's the reason for the timing," she
said.
Rugwell notified Bundy in an April 3 letter about his cattle
trespassing on public lands. She informed him they would be rounded up
and impounded because the herd had been roaming for 18 years "without
authorization in areas that are closed to grazing" in violation of the
1998 federal court injunction.
The letter said Bundy would be contacted after all the cattle had
been gathered and he would be allowed to claim any that bear his brand.
"In my mind, the most important issue with respect to trespass is the
fact trespass is unfair to other users, like recreationists. They pay
fees and follow rules. In my mind it's a fairness issue," she said
Wednesday after the roundup had been suspended indefinitely.
THE LEGAL ISSUE
Cases like Bundy's have been tried before in the courts, and county
sheriffs in Nevada, California and Idaho have had varying degrees of
support for ranchers and their causes.
But Bret Birdsong, a professor at the Boyd School of Law at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an expert on public land and natural
resources litigation, said Bundy's legal arguments that federal rangers
and BLM staff have no jurisdiction over the federal lands he uses for
ranching "are based on interpretation of the Constitution which has been
debunked by the Supreme Court for many years."
"That is clearly not the law," he said.
Bundy contends the limitless authority that the federal government
had over the territory evaporated when Nevada became a state in 1864.
However, Birdsong said the BLM still has power to enforce laws on
public land and to seize cattle through a court order or even by
administrative action.
"I don't see personally why they couldn't go back to court to seek
enforcement of the injunction," Birdsong said. "The idea that the
sheriff should come to his defense seems just wrong."
Bundy appealed the U.S. District Court ruling, and the 9th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the injunction against him in a 1999
order.
However, there is concurrent jurisdiction between the BLM and the sheriff with enforcing laws on federal land.
"If someone steals your car while you're camping at Gold Butte that
would be enforceable under state law," he said. "But if the state passes
a law that allows grazing on federal land, and federal law says you
can't, then federal law prevails where there's a conflict."
Birdsong points to a 1997 cattle trespass case in Northern Nevada
that stands as a precedent for legal action by the BLM over Bundy's
continued effort to run cattle where grazing is prohibited in Gold
Butte.
In the 1997 case, Clifford Gardner was charged with trespass by the
U.S. Forest Service for letting cattle from his Dawley Creek Ranch roam
part of the Humboldt National Forest that had been ravaged by a
wildfire. Although Gardner and his wife, Bertha, had a permit to graze
there, the Forest Service had reseeded the burn area and closed it to
grazing for two years.
Gardner violated the order by sending his cattle in and was fined for
trespassing. He was sued by the Forest Service after refusing to pay
the fine, arguing that the federal government didn't have title to the
land so he couldn't be in trespass.
The 9th Circuit, however, held that the United States, not Nevada,
owns public lands in the state and that they have power to regulate
grazing under the Constitution's property clause.
PUBLIC LANDS, PRIVATE RIGHTS
The U.S. government's authority over public land is far-reaching; its
agencies hold 87 percent of the land in Nevada. The BLM alone manages
more than 47 million acres including about half of the land in Clark
County, or roughly 2.7 million of the county's 5.1 million acres.
Reno resident Ramona Morrison, daughter of the late Sagebrush
Rebellion icon Wayne Hage, said she is closely following the Bundy-BLM
feud as a member of the Nevada Agriculture Board.
"We need to be sure due process of law is being followed and state
law is being followed and the BLM is not conducting a rogue police
operation," she said.
Her father battled the federal government for decades over public
lands and private property rights after the Forest Service greatly
reduced the number of cattle he could graze. Hage sued the agency for
harassment and prevailed in 2002 when a judge ruled he had a right to
graze cattle and use springs on federal land north of Tonopah.
But others argue that federal agencies aren't doing enough to protect public lands from overgrazing.
The Center for Biological Diversity is contemplating suing the BLM
for dragging its feet on the roundup, noting the county bought up the
grazing rights in 1998 and retired them to benefit its Multiple Species
Habitat Conservation Plan, considered a model for allowing development
and sensitive ecosystems to coexist.
"On the ground, even though good intentions have been made, nothing
is different than before," said Rob Mrowka, a spokesman for the
environmental watchdogs.
Greta Anderson, deputy director of the Western Watersheds Project, a
nonprofit conservation group, said the BLM needs to follow through on
its roundup instead of knuckling under to Bundy's threats of resistance.
"They have all the legal authority in the world but not the political will."
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.